Transferring between PCs

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I'm on the verge of buying a new PC so can anyone tell me how to go about transferring files over such as photos and videos? I have five years worth of my two boys so there's a lot of data. I don't want to buy an external hard drive just to move it across once. Any ideas??

my advice for transferring a large amount of data, take out the old hard drive and slave it to your new PC and copy the data across.

The other option would be to buy an external caddy, put the old hdd in that and copy your data across - the advantage of the first method is you will get a faster transfer rate than over USB and it cost nowt!

The plus point of the second is that caddy's are fairly cheap and you now have an external hdd

Yeah back it up...The caddie is a good idea, HD's are so cheap nowadays there's no excuse.

If you have that much data (how much?)...and a CD/DVD burner. I'd be burning a few backup disks too.

If you don't do any of the above and were thinking of keeping the second machine it's not difficult to set up a very basic network with a cheap router and yeah you guessed it use it for back up/server.

Yeah back it up...The caddie is a good idea, HD's are so cheap nowadays there's no excuse.

If you have that much data (how much?)...and a CD/DVD burner. I'd be burning a few backup disks too.

If you don't do any of the above and were thinking of keeping the second machine it's not difficult to set up a very basic network with a cheap router and yeah you guessed it use it for back up/server.

+1 on the Network option, assuming you have a router which can connect more than 1 computer, you might have to change some setting to enable you to "see" the hard drive in your old PC but then its easy to pull what you want across and leave the original as a backup.

Thanks for all your replies. Before you all have heart attacks I DO back up. Latest data is sent automatically each night to Mozy in America. I suppose in theory I could tell them about my new PC and 'restore' the data to it. But my broadband connection is slow and it would take a few weeks! I do have a laptop that I could use to put things on temporarily. 120GB - so should be fine. Only just thought of this after reading the replies. What cable do I need to connect it to the PC? If you could just send me a link to it either on eBuyer or Amazon that would be cool.

N1vlo, what's this about the power supply? I don't intend to add anything to it except software. Not sure what the problem might be here.

PC - Something like this. Copy the entire old PC's drive on to it and then slowly as time allows delete the stuff that you definitely don't need (the .exe files) - don't leave it connected to the new PC, just wheel it out once a week and back up to it...

PC - Something like this. Copy the entire old PC's drive on to it and then slowly as time allows delete the stuff that you definitely don't need (the .exe files) - don't leave it connected to the new PC, just wheel it out once a week and back up to it...